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Cover of His Majesty's Dragon

His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik

I’ve read reviews of His Majesty’s Dragon that describe it as a what-if book. That is, “What if the Napoleonic Wars were fought with dragons?” It does that, but while it’s at it it inadvertently addresses what I think is a much more interesting question: “What if air power had been an important part of European warfare 110 years early?”

The book starts out in a Horatio Hornblower universe and a genre shift creeps up on the reader gradually. William Laurence, British naval captain, captures a French ship with a dragon’s egg on board. Unfortunately, the egg’s about to hatch. Somebody on board must harness the dragon or they risk letting it go feral. The dragon chooses Laurence for a rider and he’s thrust into the Royal Air Corps.

You’ll either love the prose or hate it. The book is deliberately written in the style of novels from the early 1800’s, with long, flowery sentences that’ll leave you wondering where the verb went. I happened to like it. The book is not as stodgy as it sounds (Novik keeps the plot moving along at a modern pace). I was impressed with the technical skill it too for a modern-day American woman to bring us so thoroughly into the head of 1800’s British sea captain, complete with prejudices of the era, and we can still like him.

The plot isn’t remarkable. Laurence and his dragon Temeraire find their way around the Air Corps and eventually get accepted by their new comrades after a climactic battle against Napoleon’s forces. It’s a thin excuse for a guided tour of an R.A.F. with dragons. Novik has thought military strategy with dragons through. You’ll be treated to demonstrations of how air forces assist naval forces, how the government feeds an army of gigantic carnivores, midair safety (carabiners are a big deal), and 3-D midair maneuvers. Read it as alternate history porn and you’ll have a fine old time.

If Novik was going to be really realistic, both England and France would breed the smallest, lightest dragons possible, bomb the other sides’ civilians in the middle of the night, then run like hell. But then the dragons would be sentient airplanes and that wouldn’t be as much fun.

The most annoying moments of the book come when Novik injects twenty-first century sensibilities into the story. Some breeds of dragons will only accept female riders, so women are required to serve in the Air Corps. Laurence has to get over his prejudices and accept his female colleagues. It’s a bit much. Some of the exposition says that women riders have been around since the time of Elizabeth I, so shouldn’t the English people have culturally adapted by then? Perhaps by developing a tradition of shield maidens, like the Vikings did. I would rather have seen female aviators with a defined role in society or seen the book gone for total historical accuracy. As it is, the book is trying to have it both ways and it feels like cheating.

Also, Temeraire the dragon is too damned special. Not only is he the only Chinese dragon in the West, he’s a Celestial, the most special of the Chinese breeds, and he keeps coming up with new abilities that confound his trainers. At the big battle scene at the end he pulls a new superpower out of his ass that saves the day.

On the other hand, it didn’t bother me at all that these behemoths couldn’t possibly fly. It’s magic! Whatever. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I don’t think I’ll be going for the sequels.

A Circus of Brass and Bone by Abra Staffin-Wiebe

24161438Full disclosure: Abra’s a friend of mine. I’m going to give this book an honest review, though.

Do you have a morbid sense of humor? A Circus of Brass and Bone is great for that. A troupe of circus performers, on a return trip from a tour in India, arrive in Boston Harbor only to discover the end of the world happened while they were at sea. The book’s cast of misfits have to figure out how to live in a world where people want to know where to buy all the dead bodies, not watch a circus.

What I like best about the book is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s nominally steampunk, but the punk-y elements are woven seamlessly into the background. (Look at me! Look at me! I’m wearing a corset! is thankfully nowhere to be found.) Most of the time, Brass and Bone bears more resemblance to Shaun of the Dead than The Difference Engine. And then at times the book gets very serious and punches you in the gut when you weren’t looking.

There’s a moment near the beginning of the book where it is just beginning to dawn on the circus performers that half the city of Boston is dead. What does the narrative focus on? The skeleton man skulking around trying to steal chocolates from the fat lady. Is there something wrong with me that I was giggling like an idiot? Perhaps.

Staffin-Wiebe writes flawed characters well. Everyone in the circus has something the matter with them so they can’t get a job anywhere else. It’s tempting for a writer to give women and minority characters a free pass just to prove that they’re with the times, but in Brass and Bone, they’re just as human as the rest of the cast.

My biggest complaint is that the book went by too fast. I’m not sure if extra text got left on the editor’s chopping block or it wasn’t written in the first place, but it felt like there was supposed to be more. I think it’s especially important to flesh out the story because there are so many point of view characters. Some of them are there and gone before you ever get to know them.

There was also a moment where Lacey, the circus’s equestrienne, comes riding into New York City on a white horse. I thought white horses didn’t exist, so I Wikipedia’d that, and it turns out they’re just rare. Rare enough that I started writing this paragraph to point out a research blooper, and now I’m wondering whether there’s more to Lacey than meets the eye.

Anyway, the book is funny and it has zombie deer in it. Worth reading.

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

It’s traditional high fantasy, reimagined in Central Asia.12109372

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear follows the story of two characters through what looks to be a sweeping saga about the collapse of an empire. The first is Re Temur, a young man who’s distant in the line of succession to the Great Khagan and never expects to hold much power. But the death of the great Khagan and the resulting civil war thrust him into the limelight. The second main character is Samarkar, disgraced ex-princess of Rasa. To save herself from getting executed by her brother, she goes into training as a wizard. When she is ordered by the head of the wizards to investigate a Rasan city that’s been destroyed by the civil war, Sarmarkar’s and Temur’s lives intersect.

What I liked best about the story was the setting. Bear introduces us to a world that’s deep and rich, and even goes so far as to explain how people’s clothes are tied on. (Isn’t that something you always wonder about fantasy princesses?) But even given that, she lays on the Fantasy Counterpart Culture a bit thick. So far to the east, further east than where any of the characters live, there’s this empire called Song – I see what you did there, that’s totally China but named after a different dynasty. Far to the west, there’s a city called Kyav where the people are as pale as mushrooms and grow beets. Could that possibly be Kiev?

I’m not sure why Bear decided to split the difference – why she didn’t give the societies in her book their familiar modern names or come up with entirely new societies. Are the changed names an excuse to add fantasy creatures to the story? Maybe Bear plans to change the course of history, and Temur is totally not going to turn out to be Kublai Khan?

One thing she did with her really-guys-this-isn’t-Asia is she reimagined Islam as form of goddess worship. Women don’t catch a break, though. In this world, they’re forced to stay in seclusion because they’re incarnations of the One True Goddess. This is very interesting and I can’t wait to see where she goes with it.

At first I thought Temur was a blithering idiot, but I developed a grudging respect for him over the course of the book. This mirrored Samarkar’s own feelings about him, so it might have been intentional. (But how long is it going to take him to figure out his horse is magical?) Samarkar was far and away the more interesting co-main character. I loved her complex feelings about taking the wizard’s path and the interplay between the wizarding community and the seat of the government. In fact, I would have been happy to read a book set entirely in Tsarepheth that was all about the political intrigues of the wizards. But this is like me complaining that I wanted ravioli when somebody serves me chicken.

In my opinion, the plot was the weakest part of the book. I prefer first books of trilogies to stand on their own as books. Range of Ghosts is a grand tour of places and people we’ll need to know for the rest of the trilogy, which is great as a beginning, but not as a book. And by the end of the book, I kid you not, we have a wizard, a fighter, an ex-cleric and a monk traveling around together. It is a testament to Bear’s writing skill that she makes this look good, but I am waiting to see when she will pull the plot out of Dungeons and Dragons territory.

The Golem and the Jinni

15819028I don’t know about this one. There was a lot that I liked, but there was also a lot that I didn’t like.

The Golem and the Jinni takes place in New York city from the summer of 1899 to summer 1900. As immigrants from all over the world stream through Ellis Island, a couple of supernatural beings drift into the city and there they form a bond. That’s all you really need to know. Sure, there’s some business about an evil wizard, but he doesn’t take up that much of the plot. The book is a series of portraits of people, human and non, who are getting used to life in a strange new country. It would have worked better as a set of loosely connected short stories, which makes me wonder if Wecker’s editor forced her to make it into a novel.

The characters are delightful and I have a lot of respect for someone who can wrangle an omniscient narrator as well as Helene Wecker does, but the book sags in the middle. It relies on a lot of coincidences. (The way the golem and the jinni meet each other is glaring. New York City is how big and they just happen to bump into each other the one night the golem goes out walking?) The book is nearly five hundred pages long, but it doesn’t give the feeling of sweeping epicness that would justify its weight.

This may sound strange, but I found the body count oddly satisfying. People die in this book and they stay dead. No Disney resurrections here. Yet whenever a character dies, there’s a reason it happened and it means something to the other characters. Wecker does a great job of making the book dark, but not too dark.

The blurb on the cover said this was Wecker’s first novel and I don’t believe it for a moment. She has too much of a command of the English language for this to be her first attempt. There’s a lot more manuscripts sitting in Wecker’s desk drawer, and I’m looking forward to seeing them.

The Lies of Locke Lamora

127455Scott Lynch pulls off an impressive feat with his novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora. He tells a story with a thieves’ guild in it and keeps a straight face. Oddly enough, it works.

What I liked best about the book was the setting. It takes place in Camorr, which is sort of a magical-technological version of Venice. The humans of the city are squatting on the ruins of some ancient, super-advanced civilization that went extinct under suspicious circumstances. The society’s somewhere in the Renaissance, but some alchemical Edison lit the city up with cheap, clean-burning magical light. Way cool.

Our main characters are Locke Lamora and his gang of con men. Conning the wealthy of Camorr out of huge sums of money isn’t strictly allowed by the thieves’ guild’s big boss, but Locke and company do it anyway. As Locke sets up for his next big sting, the book looks like it’s going to be a romp, like an Italian The Wrong Trousers. Then the plan goes more and more wrong. The book ends about as far from comedy as you can get.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

17910048I’m delighted to report that The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison has a premise that’s truly original. While plenty of fantasy books have trod the territory of the half-human, half-elf moaning about his semiimmortal lot, I’ve never before seen a book where the main character has to cope with being half elf, half goblin.

The Goblin Emperor opens when the emperor of the Elflands and his three sons die in a freak airship accident. (Yeah, right, it was an accident.) The emperor’s unwanted half-goblin fourth son, Maia Drazhara, legally is next in line for the throne.

Maia is thrust into an Elvish court he’s utterly unprepared for. He has to consolidate his power, deal with racist courtiers, and spearhead a murder investigation for his father and half-brothers. Oddly enough, the world of the Elvish court is a refreshing break from Westeros. Maia’s not an idiot, and when he meets some genuinely good people at the court, they band together to form a functioning government.

The worldbuilding! Addison drops in so many casual references to the broader world that the place feels vast. What are these lion girls that the pirates like so much? Addison hints at winds of social change when Maia meets a woman on the crew of an airship. Most of the supporting characters could handle novels of their own. I have to give special props to Thara Celehar, the priest of Ulis with a dark and troubled past. His clerichood gives him the power to speak with the dead, which he uses to solve mysteries. A priest detective. That’s cooler than sharks with laser beams.

I hesitate to call this book steampunk because Addison uses such a light touch. Yes, there’s airships and an automaton unicorn, but Addison remembers there’s social issues to the Industrial Revolution as well, such as the exploitation of factory workers. The technology serves the people of the story, not the other way around, and there’s mercifully not a single pair of brass goggles to be found.

I have a few quibbles with the book. When I read about Emperor Edrehasivar VII, son of Varenechibel IV, who lives at the Alcethmeret and takes audiences at the Michen’theleian, I mentally cut out all the syllables in the middle as if it was Worchestershire. And … damn. I was going to have another quibble, but I don’t have one. This was a very good book.

Third Daughter by Susan Kaye Quinn

19472467This review contains spoilers about who winds up with whom.

I’ve wanted this book to exist for a long time. For about as long as I’ve known steampunk existed (since about 2002), I’ve wanted to see a steampunk set in an India-like society. In real life, India got a huge infusion of British culture during Europe’s industrial revolution, setting up clashes between modernity and tradition, colonizer and colonized, and all sorts of fodder for great stories. So when Guin over at Twinja told me this book is finally real, I was pretty pleased.

Our heroine, Aniri, is the third daughter of the queen of Dharia. She’s a minor enough noble that she expects to marry who she wants once she gets her majority, but then her mother asks her to accept a marriage proposal from Malik, prince of the neighboring kingdom of Jungali. For espionage reasons. The premise? Fantastic! The execution? Well, it was all right.

What I didn’t like about the book is that it’s so soppy. Poor Princess Aniri has to choose between two men, both of whom are gorgeous, and one of whom’s a prince and the other is at least well off. And I have yet to meet the heterosexual man who talks like either Devesh or Prince Malik. As a matter of fact, I can’t think of anybody I know who talks like them. All these undying declarations of love are a romance novel thing, which isn’t my thing.

I thought it was too convenient that Devesh turns out to have another woman on the side. The story would have had subtler and more complex character development if Devesh had turned out to be a traitor and loved Aniri deeply. As it is, Aniri never has to make any difficult choices after all.

General Garesh walked straight out of a James Bond movie. Not my kind of villain.

What I really liked was the spy part of the book. Quinn sets up a three-way power struggle between the nations of Dharia, Samir, and Jungali that was believable and well thought out. I appreciate that Dharia’s vast empire has visible means of support. The Dharian people have a fertile wheat belt that supports their wealth, which we get to see.

Aetheroreceiver protocol is cool. The kingdom of Jungali is cool. It’s this sort of high-tech Nepal full of cliff cities where people get around by high wire lifts.

I liked Janak a lot. If the main characters were half as interesting as him, this book would have been fabulous. As it is, the book has great derring-do, pretty good politics, and characters who could use more depth.

Free Review Copy of Cannon Fodder

Are you on Goodreads? Do you want a free copy of Cannon Fodder? For the next few weeks, I’m giving away free copies of Cannon Fodder on Goodreads in exchange for an honest review. If you’ve been on the fence about picking up a copy, and you like being opinionated about books, here’s your chance.

Check it out here on Goodreads.